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Across the Church congregations of all sizes conduct extra, special services for Holy Week – Maundy Thursday and Last Supper services, Good Friday and Tennebrae services, you name it. But are these worship services just information about Jesus, a detached retelling of the story some have heard forever and others don’t care to hear at all?
This year approach your special Holy Week worship with creativity. Here are some ideas.
If you’ve spent much time on our new site, you’ve probably noticed that I’m a fan of reflections. I’m also a huge fan of Apple computer and their advertising, which is probably why I’m a fan of reflections. Apple isn’t the only company in the advertising world that uses them, but it’s a pretty good bet that they’re the ones that started the trend.
In Design Matters, we talk a lot about using references in design work. Designers who use references create art that fits in to the present design culture. Fitting in with the design culture will make your worship media more relevant and appealing to those who experience it.
Click here to learn how to achieve this look:
Anyone who has attended our seminar knows that I’m not a huge fan of Microsoft’s Comic Sans. It’s not that I hate the font so much as it is that I hate how it’s constantly misused and abused. From the napkin dispensers at McDonald’s, to any number of boardroom Powerpoint presentations, Comic Sans has become synonymous with bad/thoughtless design.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I was utterly shocked (approaching horrified) by what I saw on one of the 24 hour news networks last week.
Last fall, one of our seminar attendees, Wendy Oleston (who has now become a friend), contacted me and asked for a critique on a set of images she’d designed for worship. Over the course of worship, a picturesque park scene was transformed into a junkyard with discarded trash, couches, cars etc (pictured below).
Wendy did a really good job cutting those items out, but she was somewhat unhappy with how they¬?looked in the final scene. She said she knew there was a problem with them, but didn’t know quite what it was. She wrote:
“the couch and all the other trash look like they were placed in there, like that don’t quite belong. If they were softened a little, they may look more like they are part of the image.”
What was she doing wrong?
In the spirit of being a teaching ministry, here’s what resides behind the curtain of our new website. Maybe there’s something here that will help your own web development.
About 15 months ago we began to realize that our old version 3 site, which we built from the ground up in 2005 using custom-made php files and zen-cart ecommerce, was getting long in the tooth. We have had to teach ourselves web development as a necessity for survival over the years, and at the time we built the v3 site, out of ignorance, we “hacked” the core code of zen in a number of places in order to get it to do what we wanted. Which worked but rendered it immune to upgrades from zen (not that there were that many).
That meant that for v4, we needed to start from scratch. What platform should we choose?